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Comment: This book has already been well loved by someone else and that love shows. It MIGHT have highlighting, underlining, be missing a dust jacket, or SLIGHT water damage, but over-all itâ?TMs still a good book at a great price! (if it is supposed to contain a CD or access code, that may be missing)

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From Clementine author Sara Pennypacker, this is a poignant middle-grade novel about two foster children who must find a way to work together in order to survive.

Eleven-year-old Stella misses her (unreliable) mom, but she loves it at great-aunt Louise’s house. Louise lives on Cape Cod, where Stella hopes her mom will someday come and settle down. The only problem? Angel, the foster kid Louise has taken in. The two girls live together but there’s no way they’ll ever be friends.

Then Louise suddenly passes away one morning—and Stella and Angel decide not to tell anyone. Now they have to depend on each other for survival. Now they are forced to trust each other with the biggest secret ever.

With great empathy and humor, Sara Pennypacker tells the story of two very different girls who unexpectedly become each other’s true family.

"The Only Game"
From New York Times best-selling author and sports-writing legend Mike Lupica comes a story of a Little League World Series star player who decides to quit baseball after a personal tragedy but eventually gets back into the game thanks to a little help from his friends.
Learn more

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Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Gr 4-6-Stella is living with her great-aunt Louise on Cape Cod because her mother has abrogated her maternal responsibilities. Angel, whose parents are both gone, is there as a foster child. Sharp-edged Angel and Heloise's Hints-embued Stella could not be more different, despite their shared lack of parents. They're spending the summer helping Louise run a small group of vacation cottages and wondering what will happen next. What occurs, however, is completely unexpected. Louise dies. Facing an uncertain future, Stella and Angel have to make some choices. Their first choice-to conceal the death-is a bad one. It leads to additional decisions-good and bad-that gradually unite the girls as they work to survive and begin to understand just what "family" means. Pennypacker's heart-touching book (Baltzer + Bray, 2013) features a summer in which adults play only bit parts and the girls uncover their own strengths. At times touching and suspenseful, this is an exceptional story and Jenna Lamia reads it in Stella's voice, with other characters sporting the accents of Boston and Portugal. She brings the tale to life and makes listeners truly care about Stella, Angel, and their fate.-Teresa Bateman, Brigadoon Elementary, Federal Way, WAα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.

Review

“A suspenseful, surprising novel of friendship and family from the creator of the popular Clementine series.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

“Pennypacker is a Beverly Cleary-caliber girl-whisperer; she can weave a yarn both funny and touching, with all the beloved, timeworn themes at the ready: friendship, family, loyalty, loss and independence.” (New York Times Book Review)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Spoiler Alert - I am giving away every little detail about this book in this review. You have been warned.

As a librarian I'm always on the lookout for good middle grade books I can booktalk to kids. Often you don't need an exciting cover or title to sell a book to kids. Heck, sometimes you don't even need to show the book at all. Yet in the case of Sara Pennypacker's debut middle grade novel "Summer of the Gypsy Moths" I fully intend to show the cover off. There you see two happy girls on a seashore on a beautiful summer's day. What could be more idyllic? I'll show the kids the cover then start right off with, "Doesn't it look sweet? Yeah. So this is a book about two girls who bury a corpse in their backyard by themselves and don't tell anyone about it." BLAMMO! Instant interest. Never mind that the book really is a heartfelt and meaningful story or that the writing is some of the finest you will encounter this year. Dead bodies = interested readers, and if I have to sell it with a tawdry pitch then I am bloody selling it with a tawdry pitch and the devil take the details. Shh! Don't tell them it's of outstanding literary quality as well!

Convinced that her free floating mother will return to her someday soon, Stella lives with her Great-aunt Louise and Louise's foster kid Angel. The situation is tenable if not entirely comfortable. If Stella is neat to the point of fault then Angel's her 180-degree opposite. They're like oil and water, those two. That's why when Louise ups and dies on the girls they're surprised to find themselves reluctant allies in a kind of crazy scheme. Neither one of them wants to get caught up in the foster care system so maybe that's why they end up burying Louise in the backyard, running her summer cottages like nothing's wrong.Read more ›

Stella lives with her Great-aunt Louise in Cape Cod because her mother lost custody. Also living with Louise is Angel, a foster child who wants nothing to do with Stella. Then Louise dies and the girls have to decide: do they call the cops and go back into the system or try to survive on their own?

There's a real strain of darkness running through SUMMER OF THE GYPSY MOTHS. Some of the darkness is blatant, but some implications will be glossed over by less mature readers. Stella and Angel have not had easy lives. While neither girl was physically or sexually abused, there are still reasons they would choose not to go to foster care. Stella was neglected by her mother and at eleven is very experienced at fending for herself. And as Stella notes in the text, the two girls get rather dirty and starved as the weeks go by and none of the adults notice.

Stella and Angel bond as their deception deepens and they do Louise's work as the manager of Linger Longer, a set of four vacation homes. Stella is obsessed with Hints from Heloise, which is both sad and funny in turns.Read more ›

I suppose I should start this review with a big old ***SPOILER ALERT*** because it's really impossible to say much of anything meaningful about the book without mentioning the big "secret". But it's really not a suspenseful surprise built up throughout the book and which would spoil the pleasure of the book if known in advance. Really, it's just a down-and-dirty plot device so that Ms. Pennypacker can tell the story she really wants to tell: the story of two troubled girls struggling to make it on their own. So anyway, last warning. If you've read this far and haven't turned back, here's what you'll find out by the third chapter anyway: Great Aunt Louise dies.

As part of any believable plot, that twist fails mightily. Pretty much everything related to Louise's death is so completely unrealistic and unbelievable that it's almost hard to take the book seriously. There is simply no way that a woman with two foster daughters, a job and a lifelong community could pass away and no one would know. The girls' attempt to cover up Louise's death are so phony and ridiculous that we might almost think we've gotten lost in some bad 1980s sitcom and we're watching a couple of kids trying to hide Mom's favorite vase that got broken.

For instance, the girls - Stella and Angel - decide that they should bury Louse in her beloved garden. But they have to bury her deep lest the animals dig her up. So there they are in broad daylight digging a hole just long and wide enough for a body. They've gotten about a foot down when George, the man who runs the cottage that Louise is supposed to be managing, shows up. The girls tell him they're planting pumpkins. Right.Read more ›